Only 3 U.S. entries for Cannes prizes

Michael Wilmington, Tribune movie criticCHICAGO TRIBUNE

Woody Allen's new movie, "Hollywood Ending," will open the 55th Cannes Film Festival, and French cineaste Claude Lelouch's "And Now ... Ladies and Gentleman" will close it. And in between, a host of familiar--and sometimes legendary --names from the ranks of world cinema will have new pictures spooled both in and out of competition.

Among this year's Palme d'Or and Grand Prize candidates, announced Wednesday in Paris: Iran's lyrical landscapist Abbas Kiairostami with "10," Belgium's harsh social realists Luc & Jean-Pierre Dardenne with "The Son," Italy's one-time enfant terrible Marco Bellocchio with "The Religion Hour (My Mother's Smile)," Finland's local rebel Aki Kaurismaki with "Man Without a Past," Russia's austere and uncompromising Alexander Sokurov with "Russian Ark," Britain's rambunctious naturalist Mike Leigh with "All or Nothing," and Polish-American-French world traveler Roman Polanski, for the first time in decades with the World War II drama "The Pianist."

Judging them will be a pair of juries headed by American auteurs and Palme d'Or winners David Lynch, president of the features jury, and Martin Scorsese, president of the short film jury. (Scorsese won for 1976's "Taxi Driver" and Lynch for 1990's "Wild at Heart.") Although U.S. directors run the juries, U.S. films and filmmakers weren't, until recently, well represented in the main competition.

Amazingly, Portugal's 93-year-old prodigy Manoel De Oliveira, the only current filmmaker whose movie career (as an actor) began in the silent era, will be back again in competition with a new movie, "The Principle of Indecision." De Oliveira, who has been directing films since 1931, continues the apparently unstoppable flow that has seen him, since his 80th birthday, make nearly a movie a year. He was a prize-winner himself as recently as 1999 with the Prix de Jury for "La Lettre."

If the U.S. seemed underbooked in the competition, France had an embarrassment of riches: four homegrown entries and five co-productions in the 22-film field. The U.S. dominates one contest, however. In a retrospective competition among seven films originally scheduled for the very first Cannes festival in 1939 (canceled because of World War II), the U.S. has three candidates, including the clear favorite: Victor Fleming's "The Wizard of Oz." Can any jury, even at Cannes, vote against Dorothy and Toto?